This was a Montage Morning, when every creaking step I take feels framed for a Steadicam. I stumble, I shuffle, I hunch. I try to avoid tripping over the cat, who is aggressively interested in eating and not particularly hip to bipedal locomotion.

I have to weigh his damn food, you know. John is adamant that he won’t have a fat cat, what he considers a dereliction in the cat world, so we measure it out carefully. We have a very fit, very pissed-off cat. Yay.

The cat is not interested in my cinematic adventures in consciousness.

It’s just rare that I have such a stereotypical blurry morning. I tend to wake up early but I’m not opposed to sleeping late. It’s just that I have guilt, for some reason. It makes me feel uneasy if, as happens on rare occasions, I wake up before dawn, go back to sleep, then notice it’s after 8. Gotta get over that.

Not this morning, though, so I sleepwalked through the first part, doing what needed doing. That bladder isn’t going to empty itself. Coffee needs to be made, because nothing gets done until coffee. I dump 85 grams of fishy stuff into the cat dish, heat up the water, get out a mug, wait. I just need a Vivaldi soundtrack. This is morning, we get it.

…

We’ve had a new Costco nearby for a few years. We let our membership lapse, since the old one was too inconvenient, a good 15 minutes or so away on side streets. We never went.

Julie and I went to the new-ish one yesterday, then, and re-upped. I admire Costco, appreciate their corporate structure and what I hear about their practices. I don’t mind giving them my business, at all. I just wonder about the utility. I’m not sure I’m organized enough to schedule toilet paper runs, and even with a deep freeze in the basement I’m not sure I’ll take advantage of what they have to offer.

I mostly like wandering the aisles. People chew a lot of gum at Costco, I think. Noticed that.

It just occurred to me that if I ever did get organized, I could make a run occasionally and fill up that freezer from Costco, load up on paper towels and dish soap, and whatever else I need can be clicked into my cart on Amazon.

This isn’t new, or an epiphany that suddenly I alone have. Tons of people shop at Costco. I don’t have to tell anybody about Amazon, which has essentially terraformed Seattle and is hard to ignore. We can streamline our shopping, local stores be damned, and I guess the whole thing will work out or not, but I wonder about socialization.

It could be just me. I don’t have an office to mingle at, and haven’t for 30 years. Sometimes my best conversations are with the butcher.

…

Most of them, though, are with my wife. Of course. We get reacquainted in the summertime, and find our bliss in 35 years of familiarity. Summers are all about bliss, or as much as we can squeeze in with the sunny days and forgotten hours that pile up while we read about the world burning up. Hey, we discuss it. It’s romantic.

We’ve also been eating our way through summer, and there are worse things. A tiny Mexican restaurant, a two-minute walk away, offers Taco Tuesdays and we’ve been taking advantage, and we’ve had more than a few other adventures in outside eating.

And since our 35th anniversary got a little waylaid by illness, not to mention my birthday, we’ve been looking for excuses. Next week, we’ll scoot down to Oregon for a night to attend a choir workshop. The event holds less excitement for me than her, but it’ll be fun and we’ll do it together. We snagged a nice hotel room for dirt cheap, and we’re not paying for it anyway. Julie took the car into the dealer this morning to see if we can fix our air conditioning for less than what’s in our checking account, given that this is shaping up to be possibly the hottest summer in history up here and we’ve got a three-hour drive in midday to manage (and then one on the back end).

And I’ll get some socialization in, one way or the other, which is the important thing. Not the toilet paper, not the air conditioning. Just old-fashioned human interaction, the kind where the other person doesn’t try to trip you and nobody’s food gets weighed, not this summer.